Albany, NY (WRGB) \u2014 It’s an ultimatum creating shockwaves from the Big Apple to Buffalo and everywhere in between. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani says if the State doesn’t go along with his proposal to “tax the rich”, he’ll raise property taxes in the City. <\/p>\n
This comes after the State, in unison with Mamdani, declared $1.5 billion was going to the City to “help address the city’s fiscal challenges”. <\/p>\n
Mamdani has revised the City’s projected budget gap from $12 billion, to $7 billion, to $5 billion in the matter of weeks. This ultimatum also comes as his projected budget does not include some of his more high-profile proposals, including free buses, city-run grocery stores and crisis response units. <\/p>\n
With that, he’s threatening a 9.5% increase in property taxes if the State doesn’t tax the wealthy more this year. <\/p>\n
“If we do not fix this structural imbalance and do not heed the calls of New Yorkers to raise taxes on the wealthy, this crisis will not disappear,” Mamdani said during his budget presentation on Tuesday. “It will simply return. Year after year, forcing harder and harsher choices each time. And if we do not go down the first path, the city will be forced down a second, more harmful path. Faced with no other choice, the city would have to exercise the only revenue lever fully within our own control. We would have to raise property taxes. We would also be forced to raid our reserves to balance the budget as required by law. Our preliminary budget takes the only path within our control, the second path. The options of the second path are the options of last resort. Options that we will only employ if there is no other means of arriving at a balanced budget. We will spend the coming months doing everything in our power to ensure that our final budget reflects the first path. We remain firmly within a budget crisis. It is a crisis that we can and will overcome, but we cannot do so without either significant structural changes in Albany or painful decisions of last resort here at home.”<\/p>\n
Mamdani, a former Assemblymember has allies in the legislature, especially amongst the Democratic Socialist faction, which sets up a potential budget battle with Governor Kathy Hochul. Hochul has maintained her position of not raising taxes in this budget, while also helping fund Mamdani’s Universal Childcare proposal in New York City through already available budget funds.<\/p>\n
Some City leaders have already expressed concern about the potential for increasing property taxes, saying the property tax system itself needs to be reformed.<\/p>\n
“The New York City property tax system is a mess,” Ken Girardin, Fellow at Manhattan Institute, says. “There are only a handful of people alive on the planet who understand all the peculiarities behind it. What it boils down to is a resistance on the part of the City Council to see property taxes go up on owner occupied houses, that is voter occupied houses, and they’ve, as a result, shifted the growth of basically shifted the property tax burden to other parts of the city. And that can have all sorts of perverse effects.” <\/p>\n
CBS6 asked Girardin where Governor Hochul can find success in the midst of this threat. <\/p>\n
“The governor still holds all the cards. She has tremendous powers under Article Seven of the State Constitution, and she will be ultimately, in a very strong position to go and win this fight,” he says. “Part of what complicates this more is that State lawmakers, and former Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani was one of them, have wanted to raise taxes for the sake of raising taxes for several years. So they’re looking for any kind of excuse to raise taxes. They want to raise taxes on a day that ends in y and if you pair that pressure now with Mayor Mamdani demanding more, that definitely complicates things for the Governor, but she’s drawn a pretty clear line that she doesn’t want to increase taxes because she looks at the numbers, she recognizes that the State is home to a shrinking share of millionaires.”<\/p>\n
Watch the full interview with Girardin here:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Albany, NY (WRGB) \u2014 It’s an ultimatum creating shockwaves from the Big Apple to Buffalo and everywhere in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138402,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":{"0":"post-138401","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-new-york-city","10":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","11":"tag-new-york-city-news","12":"tag-ny"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}